Android O Will Feature Self-Destructing Notifications

We receive notifications on our phones all the time, and since we’re all busy with our daily lives, it would be impossible to attend to all these notifications all the time. This means that these notifications can pile up, and maybe some of them might not even be relevant after a few hours, but the fact that they’re there can clutter up your screen.

However it seems that Google wants to address that issue in Android O. It has been noticed that in Android O, Google is giving developers the option of specifying timeouts for notifications, meaning that after a set period of time, these notifications will disappear/self-destruct. For example if you receive a notification about an upcoming event but you did not check it until the next day, there really is no point in the notification still being there, right?

This can also be applied for sales where a retailer might inform users via their app that they are holding a flash sale that’s only good for the next hour or two, but if you were too busy and you check your phone 5 hours later, you obviously wouldn’t be able to take advantage of it. By making these notifications disappear, it lets developers push notifications and clear them once they are no longer relevant.

This isn’t exactly a groundbreaking feature, but it is convenient and it also helps make the entire process a bit “cleaner”. Android O is currently available as a developer preview, but no word on when the final build will be released.